"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.

My GTalk spam level is and has been at zero for a long time. The only spam I got was during a brief day or two trying out GNOME 3's integration of "online services" a while back. Once I removed all of the accounts from GNOME and continued to use Pidgin, all spam disappeared as fast as it came. Before this brief period of spam, I had not received a single spam message.